Summary
Social media provide important channels for marketers to reach prequalified audiences Use of social media can magnify the message by permitting it to be repurposed and shared by members of the audience within their trusted circle, providing third-party implicit endorsement of the message.
Analysis
On December 30, 2008, the Israeli Consulate General in New York hosted
a "citizens' press conference" and invited interested parties to send
the Consulate questions about the recent Israeli military actions in
the Gaza Strip, using the social media website Twitter.com. This is
probably the first time a country's diplomats have embraced the use of
Twitter for outreach to audiences for their messaging.
Visit the source article to download the podcast interview.
People don't go to the Yellow
Pages to find the services they need. They generally don't even go to a website
of a firm. They go to Google (and to a lesser extent other search engines, but
pretty much Google).
Firms that understand this
dynamic need to ensure that they show up in the first page or so (mostly first
page) of a google search. There are several ways to do that, but Paid Ad-Words
is expensive if you have a popular search term. A better way to do it is to
create compelling "rich media" content like video and audio podcasts,
and online presentations and blogs, and to update the content on a regular,
frequent basis. Google and other search robots love pages that update
frequently (blogs) have rich content (photos, videos, audio, RSS feeds) and
lots of hyperlinks (blogs, podcast show notes pages, etc.) to other sites and
resources.
The idea is to give up some of
your knowledge content for free to the Internet world, in return for the
visibility as a thought leader. Properly programmed, we can position
a podcasting client as the ultimate resource for people who want to know
how their particular industry works, or how consumers of that product or
service can educate themselves to be more informed about using or comparing
products or services in that sector. It's all part of an overall marketing
effort that focuses on where your potential audiences are, not where your
business owners may want them to be or think they are.
Look at the top 100 podcasts
listed in iTunes, and you'll find the vast majority are professionally produced
by major names in traditional broadcast media. People want great content
produced with broadcast quality production values, by trusted brands. To the
extent that your brand has that goodwill, content produced in podcast form will
attract viewers and listeners.
Lots of companies still think
they will grow new customers/clients by putting ads in the newspaper. Most
people under 35 don't even read a daily newspaper, and a significant percentage
of them only watch broadcast television by time-shifting technology (Tivo and
DVR) and don't even glance at commercials.. And like it or not (if you are a
50-something business owner, you probably don't like it!) you're not going to
reach those vendor-specifying middle and senior managers in traditional ways.
Here's an example of the power
of a modest social media marketing strategy.
One of our clients is Walmart Stores. In addition to traditional media relations, we also produce digital photos and digital video reports about the events we cover for them, store openings, events with community groups, etc. We post the photos on Flickr.com, a social sharing site for photography (it's also a very easy way for me to transmit the photos to the agency I represent so they can email them to local weekly newspapers that still use a photo here and there). But people in the community can also see the photos when they search for Walmart on Google and other engines. The last two stores we opened for Walmart are Edison and Deptford, NJ. When you Google those stores, you see our photos, our video reports on the openings, and our office phone number -- and we are now adding addresses and phone numbers for the stores so that people can call there directly instead of dialing us and asking for the store.
